Trevin Corsiglia is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He is writing a cross-cultural, cross-temporal dissertation on the poetics of Petrarch and Walt Whitman, and is interested in the intersection of lyric poetry with philosophy. He has presented papers for the Emily Dickinson International Society, the American Comparative Literature Association, the British Comparative Literature Association, and the American Literature Association. He believes deeply in the value of public scholarship and has worked closely with the Office of Public Scholarship here at WashU. He has published a short article on Whitman’s photographic self-image for The Conversation as well as a piece on Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy for the Pittsburgh Review of Books.
What I had known was that I was living next to a church for the past five years of my life. What I had not known was that, for all these years, I was in the midst of a “Spiritual Urgent Care Center,” the appellative Reverend Fannie S. Johnson opts for to remind her congregation of the purpose of their gathering at Bracy every Sunday.